Once in royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her baby
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child.
He came down to earth from heaven,
Who is God and Lord of all,
And His shelter was a stable,
And His cradle was a stall;
With the poor, and mean, and lowly,
Lived on earth our Savior holy.
And our eyes at last shall see Him,
Through His own redeeming love,
For that Child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in heaven above,
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.
Public domain hymn text (published 1848). Words by Cecil Frances Alexander.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Cecil Frances Alexander wrote this hymn's text as part of the very same 1848 collection, 'Hymns for Little Children,' that had also produced her separate hymn 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' (hymn 77 in this collection), this time deliberately intending it as a simple, child-accessible verse explanation specifically of the Apostles' Creed's own compact phrase 'born of the Virgin Mary,' continuing the same broader pedagogical project of teaching basic Christian doctrine to young readers and singers through carefully crafted, memorable congregational verse.
The hymn deliberately and consistently emphasizes the genuinely humble, entirely ordinary circumstances surrounding Christ's actual birth — a 'lowly cattle shed' rather than any palace or place of comfort and honor — directly reflecting Alexander's broader characteristic style throughout her body of work of teaching Christian doctrine primarily through vivid, concrete, immediately accessible physical imagery specifically suited to a child's own developing imagination, rather than through the more abstract theological language typically found in hymns written for adult congregations.
Several decades after Alexander's own death, the hymn found an entirely second, considerably more famous life as the traditional opening processional hymn of the annual 'Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,' broadcast worldwide by the BBC each year from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge, a specific broadcast tradition that has continued essentially unbroken since 1918, interrupted only briefly during the Second World War.
By long-standing and carefully preserved tradition, the service begins each and every year with a single boy chorister from the college choir — chosen only shortly beforehand, and kept unaware of his selection until close to the service itself, specifically to preserve an authentic, unrehearsed quality of vocal freshness and nervous tension in the performance — singing this hymn's opening first verse entirely alone and completely unaccompanied before the full assembled choir and congregation gradually join in for the remaining verses, a now globally recognized annual moment heard live and via later broadcast by many millions of radio and television listeners worldwide each Christmas Eve.
